Terrible judgment, not his homosexuality, ruined Lord Browne

Last updated at 22:43 02 May 2007

Many people will feel sorry for Lord Browne, the fallen chief executive of BP. Here is an outstanding businessman who steered BP from being a second rank oil company into a first rank one. He is also a civilised and cultured person.

Some will go further and suggest it was the Press, and the Mail on Sunday in particular, which brought down this titan of British industry because of an unhealthy obsession with the private lives of public figures. An extraordinary career has been ruined - so the argument runs - because of the prurience of a national newspaper.

To the charge that Lord Browne's privacy has been invaded - a view he plainly holds - there will be the added suspicion that he was targeted because he was gay. Our Press, so it will be said, is not only intrusive but also homophobic.

These are serious charges, and I suspect widely believed. It would be foolish to deny the Press is sometimes guilty of them. But are these accusations that can legitimately be levelled on this occasion?

Of course Lord Browne has a right to privacy. In the case of leading politicians, who wield such enormous power over our lives, I tend to think we should know as much as possible about them, and what they have done in the past. Businessmen, even very grand ones such as Lord Browne, are in a different category. Their sexual preferences are not normally our business.

So he is perfectly within his rights when he says he has always regarded his sexuality as a private matter. It may be fashionable these days to 'come out', but Lord Browne is of a generation that sometimes prefers not to advertise these things. Moreover, he may have thought that a declaration that he was gay could damage the standing of BP in oil-rich Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia or Iran where homosexuality is abominated.

A few years ago, he appeared to deny to a Financial Times reporter that he was gay - hardly a hanging offence, though he might have been wiser merely to say that it was not the journalist's business. Then he and his advisers reportedly contemplated making some sort of admission when he was on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, before having cold feet at the last moment, and saying nothing.

All this seems perfectly reasonable. If any newspaper had run a story alleging that he was homosexual, that would have amounted to an invasion of his privacy. None did. It was widely believed that he was gay, but the Press preferred to write about his business triumphs (and more recent setbacks) as chief executive of BP.

Surely, though, the Mail on Sunday was entitled to take an interest when Lord Browne's former lover came along with a startling 'kiss and tell' story. It may be that some of Jeff Chevalier's serious allegations about Lord Browne misusing BP's property and resources during their affair are untrue. Perhaps they all are. But one fact at least cannot be denied: Lord Browne found Mr Chevalier through a male escort agency website. So far as I know, male escorts do not generally offer their services free of charge.

If Lord Browne had paid for sex with a female escort, most of us would think, given his prominent position as the chief executive of Britain's largest company, that this was a matter of some public interest. Feminists would decry his behaviour. Why should a similar encounter with a male escort be considered a purely private issue? Homophobia does not come into it.

Presumably it was partly because Lord Browne knew that the means of his encounter was not to his credit that he told the lie he had met Mr Chevalier while exercising in London's Battersea Park. He also wanted to debunk Mr Chevalier's true account of their having met via a website ('trash' was the word used by High Court judge Mr Justice Eady), thereby casting doubt on his general probity, and so came up with the Battersea Park fiction.

In fact, the Mail on Sunday originally approached Lord Browne to ask him about an allegation made by Mr Chevalier concerning BP's business strategy. It was then that the chief executive slapped an injunction on the paper. His lawyers admitted that a relationship had taken place, but dismissed everything Mr Chevalier said as falsehood. Later, Lord Browne rubbished Mr Chevalier in his witness statement in what amounted to an extremely unpleasant character assassination, and accused him of drug and alcohol abuse.

What should alarm us most of all is that for four months Mr Justice Eady prevented the Mail on Sunday from publishing any of Mr Chevalier's allegations, including the true account of their meeting, under human rights legislation. I doubt that any of these allegations would have ever come to light had Lord Browne not made the fatal mistake of producing the lie about Battersea Park, opening himself to a charge of perjury or perverting the course of justice.

Whether they own shares in BP, or have pensions which are invested in the company, millions of people had an interest in knowing about the conduct of Lord Browne, and about the allegations that had been made against him. They might have wondered at the judgment of a man who could risk a relationship with someone like Mr Chevalier. They might also have asked whether BP's problems in recent years - a pipeline leak in Alaska, the explosion at a Texas refinery that killed 15 people - were partly due to a loss of control by Lord Browne arising from his complicated affair.

Mr Justice Eady seems to have been blind to these considerations. This is only one of several recent examples of judges (in one or two cases the very same Mr Justice Eady) blocking the publication of stories, under human rights legislation, that would have previously been published without hindrance. The privacy law which Parliament has long resisted is being stealthily introduced by the judiciary.

Public figures do have a right to keep their lives private, and free from media intrusion. Lord Browne's activities put him in a special category. Nothing he did - until he tried to blacken Mr Chevalier's name - was particularly reprehensible. People might well have taken the view that he had done nothing that required the humiliating resignation as chief executive of BP that has now taken place. It is the stupid lie that damaged him.

This is a personal tragedy. No one in the vast corporation that is BP seems to have given him good and honest advice. Chief executives of huge multinational companies can become cocooned and isolated in a way that leading politicians, continually assailed by the media, rarely do. Lord Browne thought he could swat his former lover aside, and for a moment believed he could manipulate the law. He couldn't.

His reputation and good name may seem to have been destroyed, but in the long-run, his achievement in making BP one of the great companies of the world, notwithstanding some recent problems, will be remembered. I am sure this gifted man will be able to play a useful role in public life. No one holds his being gay against him. It was his judgment, not his homosexuality, that ruined him.